Hey everyone,

I’m Emmanuel Margolin, and we are Notus Systems.

TLDR:

We are building radio transceiver modules that allow for drone swarms of near unlimited size that are also >50,000x more resistant to hostile interference than the industry state of the art. They do this using a two-phase system: a proprietary mesh radar protocol at traditional microwave frequencies which reconstitutes swarm positions to high precision, and directed extremely high frequency beams, which allow for high bitrate communication even against interference many thousands of times more powerful than what is typically deployed against drones today.

While studying physics at Caltech and researching drone localization at the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies, classmates who were themselves refugees — from both sides — brought the Russo-Ukrainian war close to home. Ukraine's extraordinary resistance against overwhelming odds traces directly to their pioneering use of drones in combat, rendering massive advantages in tanks and fighter aircraft obsolete. But the advantage of drones is predicated on your ability to communicate with them, and this has started an arms race for the RF spectrum.

The Problem: Interference

Drones have a fatal flaw: jamming. The fundamental physics of drone communication at the frequencies all transceivers currently operate (1-6 GHz) is skewed against them. Drones need power efficiency, light weight, and long communication distances. Jammers, meanwhile, can be extremely heavy and power hungry. After two decades of military mesh radio development at microwave frequencies, frontline operators in Ukraine have abandoned RF entirely in favor of fiber optic communication. Russia and the United States have followed. Although resilient, fiber comes with enormous drawbacks in range and weight, and prevents any inter-drone communication

The Solution:

Instead of using microwave frequencies at 1-6 GHz, we use highly pointed directed energy beams at extremely high frequencies (60 GHz)

These pointed beams come with much smaller antenna sizes, lower weight, near interference immunity, and eavesdropping prevention. They also remove the issue of channel contention, allowing for swarms to become unbounded in size.

In addition, at our operating frequency regime atmospheric attenuation creates a natural blanket that massively disfavors stationary high-power transmitters while favoring mobile, precise point-to-point transceivers (i.e. drones). The figure below visualizes the effect for a 2km drone link against an interferer with 200x more power:

Directional beams come with one major drawback, however: you need to know where other drones are to point the beam and use the network, but you need the network to know where other drones are. This circular dependency has traditionally made the use of beamformed communication for drone swarms impossible despite 60 GHz phased array chips being commodity devices for over a decade.****

To solve this problem, we spent the last year developing and testing a new radar protocol designed specifically for drone swarms: mesh radar.

Mesh radar works in the lower microwave band, feeding swarm position estimates in real time to the phased array network at EHF (60 GHz)— essentially having the drone swarm become its own GPS constellation, and guiding the phased array network on where to point.

Unlike current localization systems which often rely on an inefficient N² pairwise comparison algorithm — severely limiting swarm size to <100 — or the extremely short-range UWB, Notus’ mesh radar sends long, specially constructed radar pulses that have been lab tested to withstand in excess of 40dB of interference, while an inference algorithm reconstructs positions to high accuracy and without practical constraint on swarm size. The mesh radar network is also completely decentralized, meaning the sudden loss of one or many drones does not reduce the stability of the system.

Team

Emmanuel Margolin (CEO)
Drone researcher at Caltech Center for Autonomous Systems Technology
Previous experience working in the field with Ukrainian drone communication specialists and startups

Allen Lin (Founder)
Triple major in CS, Philosophy & History @ UCSD
Embedded systems engineering @ General Dynamics & Google
Previously subsystem engineering team lead for Tomahawk cruise missile

plus incoming founders at[ notussystems.com/team](https:// notussystems.com/team)
and contact us at founders@notussystems.com.